I think hillbilly was just kidding, but if anyone ever wondered: we will not be offering prizes for winning Song Fight. In addition to the financial and logistical issues surrounding prizes, adding such a physical (or even digital) remuneration would introduce motivations to win that we don't want to encourage. Cheating right now is minimal because the only thing at stake is an "I won" and getting that via cheating is a hollow victory.

This issue was brought viscerally to life for me several years back by a contest held by this guy named "Odd Todd" for covers of Duran Duran songs. Basically, there were prizes and shit involved, and lots of cheating. In his words: "So the contest sort of got hosed because some people found out the super-secret way to cast like a ton of votes."

So anyway. No prizes. If you feel like cheating in order to win Song Fight, you probably need the ego boost pretty badly so you go right ahead and grab those fake bragging rights.

Note: I don't consider friend-flooding to be cheating. If you want to defeat a friend-flood, go get some of your own fans or write a song that will win despite the flooding. Everybody has to pick at least two songs to vote for, so if you can't beat somebody who has 15 friends to vote for them, FIGHT HARDER.

I used to do a lot of traveling around the US and there were tons of Aussies flooding the hostels in the Summer (their winter)... ah... and yeah, they were mostly good looking and fun. But then again, that's a weird subset of the population. Young folks with enough time and money to wander around the States for a couple of months.